The Truth About the “Ricin Cell”:
There Was No Ricin and No Cellby Milan Rai
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 21, 2005

THE WILD CLAIMS

On 13 April, an
Algerian asylum-seeker named Kamel Bourgass was found guilty of plotting to
use poisons to cause a “public nuisance” in Britain. This rather minor
offense has been blown up into a national crisis by the British Government,
the police, the intelligence services, and the mass media, in yet another
example of “counter-terror” scaremongering.

At the start of the
misnamed “ricin affair” in January 2003, the public was told that an al
Qaeda cell had been arrested before it could launch a terrorist attack using
the chemical weapon “ricin”. The public was told that the police had
discovered traces of ricin in the flat used by the cell.

It has now been
established that there was no “ricin” and no “cell”.

BRAVE FACES IN SCOTLAND YARD

“Senior Scotland Yard
officers are putting on a brave face even though several privately admitted
that the outcome of the case was ‘disappointing’... [After] one of the
biggest operations mounted by SO13, the Yard’s anti-terrorist branch, only
one man, Kamel Bourgass, was convicted of a terrorist offence” -- his eight
co-defendants were found not guilty or had charges dropped against them. (Sunday
Times, 17 Apr., p. 4)

It was “blow” to
police and the intelligence services, who “arrested more than 100 people and
visited 26 countries” during a two-year investigation. (TheTimes,
14 Apr., p. 1)

Defense lawyers said
(accurately) that it was “a ‘catastrophic’ embarrassment for the
government’s war on terror.” (Financial Times, 14 Apr., p. 5)

THE TRUTH ABOUT RICIN

Kamel Bourgass
confessed to having copied out a recipe for making ricin, a poison which can
kill if it is injected, eaten or inhaled. “The jury heard that the plan had
been to kill people by smearing ricin on door handles in Holloway, north
London. But Prof [Alistair] Hay [the toxicologist] said: ‘With these recipes
they could not have killed people. Ricin is not absorbed through the
skin.’”(The
Guardian, April 14, 2005)

The US Government’s
Center for Disease Control and Prevention
website says of “skin and eye exposure”: “Ricin in the powder or mist
form can cause redness and pain of the skin and the eyes.”

Redness and pain. That
is what Bourgass was convicted of conspiring to inflict on North
Londoners.

“Porton Down
scientists who tried to recreate Bourgass’s experiments found that they
might have produced material sufficient to kill a large sheep, but not a
single human being, let alone thousands.” (Editorial,
The Observer, 17 April)

THE SHIFTING CHARGES

This is partly why
Bourgass was convicted only of conspiring to cause a “public nuisance” -- a
common law offense said by the Crown to involve plotting to use poisons to
cause “‘disruption, fear and injury’... the jury could not decide on a more
serious charge of conspiracy to murder using poisons, including ricin and
cyanide, for which he had recipes. He will not face retrial on this charge.”
(Daily Telegraph, 14 Apr., p. 1)

“Charges against the
[defendants] claiming they conspired to make chemical or biological weapons
were quietly withdrawn from some of the original indictments drawn up by the
Crown Prosecution Service. Instead, prosecutors substituted charges of
‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’ -- highly unusual charge dismissed
by defence lawyers as a ‘Mickey Mouse’ offence. Because of a gagging order
granted by the court at the request of government lawyers, the fact that the
chemical weapons charges had been dropped was not reported.” (Sunday
Times, 17 Apr., p. 4)

RICIN NOT FOUND

When a team from
Porton Down chemical and biological weapons research centre entered
Bourgass’s flat on 5 Jan. 2003, it detected the presence of ricin: “But
these were high sensitivity field detectors, for use where a false negative
result could be fatal.” “A few days later in the lab, Dr Martin Pearce, head
of the Biological Weapons Identification Group, found that there was no
ricin.” (Duncan Campbell, The Guardian, 14 Apr.)

There are different
accounts of what happened next. Duncan Campbell says in the Guardian
that, “when this result was passed to London, the message reportedly said
the opposite.”

The Sunday Times
says that Porton Down “only formally informed Scotland Yard about their new
findings at a meeting in March [2005]”: “Sources in the case say Andrew
Gould, a scientist at Porton Down whose role was to liaise with Scotland
Yard, has accepted responsibility for the bungle. Gould admitted in court
that he had not passed on the test results and that the public had been
misled as a result.” (Sunday Times, 17 Apr., p. 4)

This is contradicted
by another Guardian report that says that, “Porton Down documents
show that by January 8 scientists at the defense research facility had
written to the police declaring there was no ricin on several items from the
flat.” (Guardian, 14 Apr.) An intriguing mystery.

Whatever the truth
behind these confusing reports, it is a fact that the non-existence of the
ricin supposedly at the heart of the “ricin” trial received little attention
in the media. The Telegraph left it to the last paragraph of their
front-page story to tell its readers that the initial ricin scare had been a
“false positive result.” The Guardian left it to the 25th paragraph
in its 28-paragraph main story to note that ricin was not actually found.

AL QAEDA NON-CONNECTION: MEGUERBA

There was no ricin.
There was no “cell”. What about al Qaeda? The Telegraph said Bourgass
was “trained by al-Qaeda to be one of its top poisoners . . . a trained
assassin and one of Osama bin Laden’s most ruthless followers.” (14 Apr.,
pp. 1, 2) The only evidence to this effect came from the confession of a
fellow Algerian, Mohammed Meguerba, under “interrogation” by the Algerian
security forces.

Interesting, then,
that, “Evidence from Meguerba was withheld from the jury during the trial,
after the prosecution argued he was an unreliable witness.” “Although
information said to come from Meguerba was used to mount the raid that led
to the ricin arrests, he later changed his story when interviewed in Algeria
by British police officers, saying that he played no part in preparing the
poisons and had merely heard Bourgass talking about his expertise as a
poison maker.” (Observer, 17 Apr., p. 8)

AL QAEDA NON-CONNECTION: THE RECIPES & GSPC

The prosecution argued
that Bourgass had copied chemical recipes from al Qaeda manuals. But, “It
[Bourgass’s recipe book] had nothing to do with al-Qaeda and was translated
into Arabic from American survival handbooks. This was demonstrated by
Duncan Campbell, the espionage expert, and accepted as such by Porton Down,
the MOD’s chemical research establishment.” (Simon Jenkins, The Times,
15 Apr., p. 20)

It has been alleged
(but not proven) that Bourgass is a member of the Algerian terror group the
GSPC. But the GSPC is not al Qaeda.

As the Financial
Times notes, “the trial has ended without producing any definitive
evidence of Mr Bourgass’s links with any terrorist organization, and with
questions remaining over his true identity and that of a co-conspirator
Mohamed Meguerba who remains detained in Algeria.” (14 Apr., p. 5)

MEGUERBA: AGENT PROVOCATEUR?

“The Observer
has discovered that [Meguerba] was forced by his country’s intelligence
service to make a telephone call to Britain to ‘provoke’ his associates into
further action... The news raises the possibility that Meguerba was working
for the Algerians as an agent provocateur... One call had been made to
‘locate’ an individual of interest to Algerian intelligence, and a second to
‘provoke’ another person.” (17 Apr., p. 8)

Interestingly,
“Bourgass himself said that he had copied out the poison recipes at
Meguerba’s request.” (Sunday Telegraph, 17 Apr., p. 21)

BOURGASS’ MURDERER

The one crime
definitely committed by Bourgass was the killing of Detective Constable
Stephen Oake, part of the team that arrested Bourgass. However, “a vital
question remains unanswered... was he a hardened terrorist, or a fugitive
scared out of his wits at being sent home.” Bourgass is a failed asylum
seeker turned illegal immigrant. (The Independent, 15 Apr., p. 42)

RICIN AND THE WAR

“Tony Blair claimed at
the time of Bourgass’s arrest just before the Iraq war, in flagrant contempt
of court, that he was intent on launching ‘weapons of mass destruction’ with
‘huge potential’... Peter Hain predicted a ‘ricin attack’, whatever that is,
on the House of Commons. All this was garbage.” (Simon Jenkins, The Times,
15 Apr., p. 20) Blair went to the Commons in Feb. 2003 “to tell MPs that the
alleged conspiracy was ‘powerful evidence’ of a continuing terror threat to
the nation.” (The Independent, 14 Apr., p. 4) George W. Bush and his
Cabinet also used “the ricin plot” to build a justification for the invasion
of Iraq.

We know now that there
was no ricin, and no “cell”. One man experimented with poisons -- showing no
signs of preparing to use them in this country. There is no evidence (apart
from the unreliable Meguerba) as to the intended targets of “the plot” or as
to Bourgass’s alleged terrorist affiliations. The “chemical weapon” was not
lethal, but merely irritating to the skin.